


another hollow-point conversation

by stardustandswimmingpools



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Broken Love, Crying, F/M, Indulgent Metaphors, Metaphors, Sad, Steve Harrington Deserves Better, also indulgent subtle references, anyway, i love steve and nancy but i just can't see them together after this, i wish i could! i wish they could be together, love despite oneself, rating for language and also because of general themes i guess, rehashing relationships, shouting briefly, this one is not a fun one kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 04:52:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12646479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustandswimmingpools/pseuds/stardustandswimmingpools
Summary: “I need to tell you something,” she says, sounding as if she’d rehearsed that one sentence the whole way here.Steve almost slams the door in her fucking face. They haven’t spoken since that night when Eleven returned. It was pretty much a given that their relationship was no more.“Come in,” he says.





	another hollow-point conversation

**Author's Note:**

> first and foremost i would like to say this: you may decide for yourself if you think that Nancy cheated on Steve when she kissed (and, it's implied, slept with) Jonathan. they were technically still dating. personally i think it's pretty similar to the Ross/Rachel thing, and yes, they were both on a break. of sorts. which is not to say that Nancy was in the right, or that she should've kissed Jonathan: i just don't think she cheated, exactly.  
> anyway!  
> this one's a sad one, but i feel like it needed to be written. i'm kind of hashing out that month between when they close the gate and when the Snow Ball happens, and this is an important part of it. I also know this isn't the most satisfying conversation, because it ends with pain and all, but i think it's some closure for Steve, at least. Nancy still feels badly, but Steve kind of...seals it off. Anyway, I read this other fic called [the same damn hunger](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12579316) by TolkienGirl, which i also thought was really good, so you can give that one a try!  
> title is from All Time Low's _[Drugs& Candy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzueOh-d15M)_ , which I think is such a good fucking song, and also a pretty good representation of Steve and Nancy's relationship at the end. You're welcome to listen to that if you want, while you read. Or after/before you read. It's a good song.

Nancy shows up at his house a week after that Eleven kid comes back. 

Steve is on the couch in the living room, watching something on TV, although his mind started wandering about three commercial breaks ago, so he’s not sure exactly what’s on. It has done that much more frequently than he’d like, in the past week. Wander. It wanders to the Upside Down. It wanders to the kids, how they’re doing. It wanders to Nancy, which pisses him off.

There’s a double knock on the door, clear and sharp. Steve heaves himself off the couch and lumbers over to the door.

He opens it to Nancy’s face. 

“I need to tell you something,” she says, sounding as if she’d rehearsed that one sentence the whole way here.

Steve almost slams the door in her fucking face. They haven’t spoken since that night when Eleven returned. It was pretty much a given that their relationship was no more.

“Come in,” he says.

* * *

They’re in the kitchen, and the blinding fluorescent light makes everything feel more wrong.

“Go ahead,” he says. They are facing each other, approximately four feet between them, and the distance stretches on forever.

It takes Nancy a moment to talk. Steve is not going to be the first. He will be stoic. He doesn’t deserve to feel like this.

Finally she begins, her voice wobbling already. “Steve, I did —” She looks like she’s about to cry. And Steve’s resolve crumbles. He almost feels mercy.  _ Almost. _ His heart is reaching out — he can feel it, the way it aches and burns like that. That he still fucking loves her, even if to her it’s all just bullshit. So he almost interrupts. He wants to save her the — the shame of having to say what he  _ knows _ she’s about to say.

But then it hurts again. He thinks,  _ you deserve this. I love you, and you deserve all of the pain you’re going to feel when you tell me you cheated. _ He  _ wants _ it to hurt her. So that he can know that at least she did care about him at one point. Even if it was just for a split second.

He folds his arms over his chest like that’ll protect his heart from this blow. Leans against the counter. The edge presses into his spine. 

“I’m sorry,” Nancy whispers.

Steve says nothing.

“I — when we…Jonathan and I, we went on a road trip. To this guy’s house. Murray Bauman. He’s a — freelance investigator.”

“Nancy, please,” Steve says, and instantly curses himself for sounding so...hurt. “Spare me. Just tell me what we both know.” He swallows. “You don’t love me.”

“I kissed Jonathan,” Nancy says hoarsely. “We — um.” Her red cheeks and hesitance are more than enough to give Steve an idea. “But it’s not that I don’t love you.”

“But you don’t,” Steve says dully. It’s kind of poor planning on Nancy’s part: confessing to essentially cheating (Steve would probably argue that their relationship was already broken by the time she slept with Jonathan, but that’s up for interpretation and he really doesn’t want to think about it) just before telling him that she technically loves him.

“It’s more than just love or don’t love!” Nancy cries. “It’s — I couldn’t keep...doing what we were doing. Pretending everything was normal. And Jonathan —”

“Not to be rude,” Steve says, his voice tight and sharp, “but I don’t want to hear about your relationship with Jonathan.”

Nancy tugs on her hair and looks down. “Sorry,” she says. Her voice has never sounded so fucking small. “I didn’t want to pretend everything was different. I couldn’t love you in the relationship we had before. The one where we were both pretending.”

Steve wants to yell. He wants to fucking tear her apart with words, to pierce her with a couple of well-placed “bullshit”s. He wants to yell that  _ he  _ wasn’t pretending. That every goddamn word he said in that relationship was real, was true, was how he actually felt — he didn’t lie to her. Not one fucking time. He wants nothing less than to be listening to Nancy explain how their ostensibly stable relationship, the one where they loved each other and helped each other — to hear how that was all a lie, and hear it get ripped to shreds in his ex-girlfriend’s voice, no less.

He keeps listening. Call him a masochist.

“Jonathan understood that we couldn’t just keep pretending,” Nancy tells him. She rushes through that sentence, like she knows that he doesn’t want to hear about Jonathan the Great or whatever. “That we could at least try to fix it. Fix something. So we found this guy, and we...we solved it. Kind of.”

The worst part of it is that he doesn’t hate Jonathan. He can’t. Jonathan isn’t the kind of guy you hate. He doesn’t try to be likable, and frankly that’s not a word to describe him. He’s not an amiable guy. He’s blunt. But he’s nice to Nancy and nice to Steve. He was never forward with Nancy during their relationship — in fact, he backed off.

But that makes this sour taste even thicker. Because Steve would like to believe that Jonathan wouldn’t have done anything if Nancy hadn’t implied that she wanted him to.

But Nancy had wanted him to.

It’s all too convoluted and Steve really would rather drive a spike through his head.

“It just...It’s not that I went with him because I wanted to be with him,” Nancy says. “I need you to know that. I went with him because I knew if I told you you’d talk me out of it. That you would want to stay safe. And,” when he goes to argue, “I don’t blame you. I don’t! Steve, you were trying to protect me, I get it. But I didn’t want protecting. I don’t need protecting. What I wanted was someone who agreed with me that something needed to be done.”

“Okay,” Steve says, rubbing a hand over his face. “I get it. You wanted someone to understand you, and I didn’t. You can stop now.”

“I did love you,” Nancy whispers.

Which is the wrong fucking thing to say.

Everything — every feeling, every thought, every moment spent thinking about Nancy, about whether she ever really loved him, about whether they’d still be together when this was all over, about that night at the party, thinking about every word she’d spoken, the tone of her voice — breaks out of Steve in a singular moment, like he’d been possessed and suddenly it’s all draining out of him.

“You loved me!” Steve shouts, gripping the edge of the counter in his hand. His knuckles are still split from punching Billy, and it  _ hurts _ to even make a half-fist, but it  _ needs _ to hurt to feel like anything at all. “You did, huh? So it wasn’t all the bullshit you said it was? You couldn’t even  _ say _ it, Nancy! You couldn’t say you loved me! So don’t tell me now, now that you have your shiny new boyfriend and you have this easy out — don’t tell me you loved me  _ now _ . Now it’s too fucking late. It doesn’t do either of us any good. We’re already done now.” He feels it all at once: all of that pain. Being clobbered by Max’s psychopath brother pales in comparison to how this feels. It’s like being wrenched apart from the center. Like someone has stuck their hands inside his stomach and is just  _ pulling  _ in opposite directions. He remembers her face when he’d said it.  _ “Then tell me!” “Tell you what?” “You love me!” _ The indignance that had all too quickly been replaced with...shame. Because she couldn’t fucking say it. “You must have conveniently forgotten until now,” he spits.

“Steve, I’m sorry,” Nancy whispers. She’s crying. There are tears in her eyes. 

It hurts to watch her cry. But the thing is this: she’s not crying because of him.

She’s crying because of herself, and that’s the thing she can’t get away from.

There is no pity. Not from him. She deserves this. She needs to know that she deserves this. He opens his mouth to tell her.

What he says is, “I hope you and Jonathan understand each other. One day you’ll forget about me. This will just be another high school fling, won’t it?” He swallows thickly. There’s a knot in his stomach roughly the size of a demogorgon. “You’ll get over it. Me, I mean. You’ll get over me. And that guilt you’re feeling, it’ll go away. Trust me.” The knot is shrinking. “I don’t hate you. God, it would be easier to hate you. But I don’t hate you. One day you’ll be able to look me in the eye. Not today. Don’t you dare do it today. But one day you’ll feel better about it.”

“You’re not a high school fling,” she manages.

“I’m a stepping stone,” Steve says flatly. “You needed me to move on. You needed me to realize that you don’t need me. I get it.”

“Steve…”

“Nancy,” Steve says. Her name hurts his mouth. “You don’t want to pretend? Then stop telling me you love me.”

Nancy opens her mouth and nothing comes out. There are tears spilling down her cheeks. Steve represses the urge to wipe them away. That’s not his job anymore.

“You should go,” he says. He’s grateful for not crying because his face is still banged up and that’d sting like the devil. Small mercies.

Nancy is still crying. 

She deserves to be crying.

But she doesn’t deserve to be crying forever.

He opens the door for her and for the first time that night, when he talks, there’s no anger. No bite. 

“Everyone,” he tells her, surprising himself with insight, “gets their heart broken. Yours will heal. Okay?”

“But what about yours, Steve?” Nancy whimpers.

Steve’s face hardens. “‘Bye, Nancy. See you around.”

He closes the door and leans against it, exhausted like he’s never felt in his lifetime.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! i'm trying to figure out this whole month time skip, so hopefully you'll hear back from these two, but we'll have to see. no promises from me, that's for sure. i do believe that they deserve a better ending. anyway, you can follow me on tumblr [@vivilevone](http://vivilevone.tumblr.com/) if you like, and feel free to come chat about whatever! thanks!


End file.
